Customizing Your Mac

Your Mac is ready to use right out of the box. Just plug it in! This is one of the things we love most about Macs  there is no set-up or installation required  open the box, plug it in and get right to work. However, the Mac user-interface (the way the computer screen looks, and many aspects of how it responds to your commands) is the most customizable in the world. After a while, leaving your computer at all the factory settings is like having your VCR still flashing 12:00 .

You will discover that much of the customization of your Mac is accomplished through what are rightfully called Control Panels. So we will walk through these and the other fine-tuning tools on your Mac to help you make this better computer, the best computer for you.

Be forewarned  a lot of our customization tips reflect our biases as to how we like our Macs to look  don't feel compelled to use only the settings we recommend. Rather, use these as a springboard to get you to play with all of the available settings. In the end, see what you like best.